Essential Reading

In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets; many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement.

Reincarnation was an integral part of early Christianity (as was strict vegetarianism. Ed.). Near Death.com explores what it refers to as the “secret teachings of Jesus” and how all traces of it and Christian Gnosticism were later erased

The terror outrages in Britain last year may not have been the work of “Muslim extremists”. A series of virtually unreported events in a Birmingham hotel suggest the covert involvement of Britain’s intelligence agencies in orchestrating events

Loveday Morris, Karen Deyoung — Stuff.co.nz June 23, 2014

The 300 US advisers authorised to assist the Iraqi security forces will find an army in crisis mode, so lacking in equipment and shaken by desertions that it may not be able to win back significant chunks of territory from Al Qaeda renegades for months or even years, analysts and officials say.

Abandoned Iraqi military equipment left during the flight from Mosul. Click to enlarge

After tens of thousands of desertions, the Iraqi military is reeling from what one US official described as “psychological collapse” in the face of the offensive from militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The desperation has reached such a level that President Nouri al-Maliki is relying on volunteers, who are in some cases receiving as little as a week’s military training, to protect his ever-shrinking orbit of control.

“Over time, what’s occurred is that the Iraqi army has no ability to defend itself,” said Rick Brennan, a Rand Corp. analyst and former adviser to US forces in Iraq. “If we’re unable to find ways to make a meaningful difference to the Iraqi army as they fight this, I think what we’re looking at is the beginning of the disintegration of the state of Iraq.”

The US government has sped up the supply of reconnaissance equipment since the Iraqi military’s rout in the key northern city of Mosul this month, but the Iraqi government has expressed frustration at the pace and scope of assistance.

The government’s dire situation was evident Sunday at the Baghdad Operations Command, the nerve center of the capital’s security operations, run jointly by the Interior and Defence ministries. Standing in front of an illuminated map, spokesman Grigadier General Saad Maan gestured toward the broad swaths of land outside the city’s boundaries that are now considered hostile territory.

“We treat all these areas surrounding us as hot zones,” he said. Though Maan claimed that security forces were taking the offensive in some areas, insurgent advances in the western province of Anbar over the past few days have raised concerns that the armed forces may crumble further.

Even before tens of thousands of troops disappeared into the night two weeks ago, Iraqi generals had complained that they were outgunned by an enemy hardened by years of fighting in Syria and in possession of more advanced weaponry.

In recent weeks, ISIL has seized hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment from the Iraqi army, much of which has been smuggled back across the border to Syria, according to Iraqi officials. The frontier is now largely in the hands of ISIL, which seeks to create an Islamic caliphate stretching across Syria and Iraq.

Lieutenant General Rasheed Fleih, head of the Anbar Operations Command, in the critical western province bordering Syria, put on a stoic front Sunday, claiming in a televised statement that “security forces are reviving” and that volunteers are being deployed to the area.

But the addition of tens of thousands of volunteers to the security forces has been chaotic.

Many are joining under the banners of militias, though Maan argued that they will not be able to function as such. When they sign up, they will be given a “week or less” of training and be deployed where they are needed, he said.

“The basic problem with the Iraqi military is that it’s a sectarian force,” said James Jeffrey, a former US ambassador to Iraq. “That’s combined with the fact that you have sycophantic generals, you have low morale and a Shiite volunteer force. They didn’t do very much training. They don’t have the equipment or skills of the [ISIL] guys.”

The crisis in the armed forces is a result of corruption, poor leadership and intelligence, and severe inattention to training, said a former US adviser to the Iraqi armed forces who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. Those problems have turned what was a functioning military when US troops withdrew in 2011 into an “empty shell that is resorting to a call to arms of men and boys off the street,” he said. He added that the scale of the reverses this month was “catastrophic.”

Accusations Against Officers

Members of the security forces who were serving in Mosul when the Iraqi army’s 2nd Division disintegrated this month complained that the leadership vanished in the face of the ISIL offensive. The speed of the collapse has led to accusations from some soldiers that their leaders were in some way complicit. Maliki is sending 59 officers to court for fleeing their posts.

“It’s the fault of the people higher up. They should have done something,” said an Iraqi police officer who fled Mosul for the Kurdish territories when ISIL swept in. He gave his name only as Taha.

Taha, who had been a police officer for eight years, said commanding officers in the Iraqi security forces had ignored a surge in extremist violence in Mosul in the months leading up to the city’s fall.

The bleak situation in the Iraqi military looks unlikely to change soon. US military advisers will filter in gradually, working first with a few units in Baghdad, American officials said. Some may be deployed to battalion level. They will initially take on an assessment role, reporting back on the state of the Iraqi military and its needs.

With Iraq’s armed forces in a shambles, only with substantial outside assistance will Baghdad be able to turn the tide of the war, analysts and officials say.

Iraqi officials say their needs are wide-ranging and start withUS airstrikes. Some of the most effective tools in the Iraqi arsenal are propeller planes and helicopters mounted with US-supplied Hellfire missiles. But two Iraqi officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media, said Sunday that they have run out of missiles, although a delivery is expected within days.

Hamid al-Maliki, an air force commander, said intelligence-sharing has improved as the US government has increased surveillance and reconnaissance. Ten ScanEagle surveillance drones are expected to be delivered in the next 10 days, he said.

The army is attempting to regroup, though it will probably take years to restructure. Troops and police officers who have sought to return to the security forces are quietly being organised on the border of Iraq’s Kurdish region, said Maan and Maliki.

“We are opening new bases and reconstructing units that collapsed in occupied areas,” Maliki said. Maan said the new forces include army, police and local volunteers. “Now is not a time to distinguish between army and police, anyone who is willing to work will work,” he said.

However, Jabar Yawar, a spokesman for the Kurdish pesh merga security forces that control the front line between the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan and ISIL-occupied Mosul, denied that Iraqi forces were reconstituting units in that area.

“In Mosul and Salaheddin provinces, there is no Iraqi army or police or anything,” Yawar said.And each day, ISIL appears to be capturing more ground, expanding its control to the villages at the margins of its burgeoning state, and along Iraq’s border with Syria.

“There is no resistance from the Iraqi army because it has no nationalism, no leadership,” he said. “There is no sense of protection for the nation.” -Washington PostSource